Blog

Why custom themes are better than ready-made themes?

Enthusiastic entrepreneurs are always in a hurry to launch their websites. Most of the time, this excitement and at times, lack of funding attract them towards the eye-catching ready-made themes available out there in the market which have plenty of design options. Opting for these ready themes over customizing your own themes is an easy approach but has its own long-term hitches.

Numerous successful businesses thus far have started with one plan but have grown taking different courses. It is necessary to have your platform flexible enough to satisfy your new business needs at every stage; and in the virtual world, a website is the key identity of any business.

Let’s find out how the custom themes could work better for any business than the ready-made ones:

Cosmetic perspective

Though available in a lot of variety, you would not be the only organization using a pre-made theme as inevitably as the same theme could be picked by any other user. A customized theme on the other side is tailored in your way and there itself keeps you on the advantage of standing out distinctive and original.

Flexibility for customization/integrations

Plugins for the ready-made themes are known for keeping limitations on a few functionalities for the users to satisfy all their needs i.e., their elements are designed to be used as available. More importantly, the pattern of the written code can lead to incompatibility issues with the third-party plugins or could cause conflicts while integrating with third-party services.

Also, there may be functionalities present with the whole package of a ready-made theme. Now you may like some of its features while others may not be useful to you. Also, there may be some features which are essential for you, but the themes lack these. You will obviously get them integrated to it later. So, it is like going for a ready computer system v/s assembling your own according to your needs and using the resources at its optimum.

The more explicit functionalities you want, the more sensible it would be to hire a professional development team and create a customized theme, hence completely leverage and own your product.

You may want to go ahead and own the enterprise-level, end-to-end solution tailored to your organization’s need and business at Techechelons, blended with the best coding and crafting practices by the team of experts.

Support

Pre-designed themes usually come with user manuals but, in cases, where the documentation is poorly written or not available, it becomes difficult to install the theme, identify the plugins and setup everything correct; whereas the developers hired for the customized development assure an extensive support and handhold the user for smooth installations.

Easy maintenance and updates installation

Updates from the service providers are unavoidable as they deliver certain fixes to known issues as well as security breaches. While installing these updates, it becomes necessary to take care of the stable version to rollback in case, the updates cause instability/data loss instead of improvising.

Also, at times, these updates need technical support to install. You can get rid of these pains and have easy maintenance by customizing your own theme and let the experts handle all the troubles.

Better Quality Assurance

Before your website is in the production environment and goes live to the public, it’s important to find the issues that could potentially go wrong. There are possibilities you could face issues related to browsers, functionalities or performance. It is also possible that performance issues pertain only with the mobile platform which is equally accessed. You definitely wouldn’t want to set against an entire group of users interested in your services simply because of a small bug that could have been avoided by testing and addressing it straightaway.

Some problems occur only when we start modifying the theme and hence testing the design of your website is an on-going process; In case of ready-themes, it can become difficult for you to get these bugs fixed instantly or you may have to fix them yourselves!

For your customized theme, you can make sure about the basic functionality, stability security and access-related authorizations, but the same cannot be made sure about pre-built websites. A hole in your theme may put you at risk, therefore. Optimization and responsive behaviour can also be defined better in the custom-built themes.

Visibility of your website/Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

By visibility of any website, we mean that how your pages are found by the users on the web. There are some requirements which themes need to meet to be SEO ready and there are some quality standards by the search engine which when met, your site is searched higher in the results.

It is a usual practice by the owners to take up SEO at a later stage once the website is launched and that’s where it is too late and becomes difficult for the engine bot to find and index content of the webpages due to the faults left at the time of development. The theme plays a key role here as these things are set while building it and hence custom themes remains a big bang for the buck.

There are a few other factors like site load speed, the website architecture, responsive design, schema mark-up, plugin integration on which SEO highly depends and challenging to achieve in the pre-designed theme. Your website is SEO friendly when these factors are prioritized in the early phase of website planning as well as throughout the whole website building process.

Time and cost-benefit analysis

Initially, going for ready-themes looks faster and cheaper but when the above points are taken into consideration, along with update related additional costs, custom themes have a lot lesser overhead eventually. It is not recommended to keep modifying ready themes frequently and it may so happen that you will need to spend more time and money.

In all, everything depends on your target audience, the type of your business/website and on how, when and where you want to save/spend time and money.